No, Hitchcock meant that you must at all times be gratifying the user, constant thrills with no downtime in between. Just peck a button and get a treat... errr..

Causing people to work for their rewards? Nah, thats insane. Just give it to em in a constant stream, thats all the little lab rats want.

I gotta say that WoW was still fun for me when I was still getting all the flight paths. I'd swim, walk and run everywhere and it was exciting to explore a new area that was way over my head, to attempt to get a flight path that I wouldn't even use until much higher levels. I'd swim half way around a continent and see where I could get to. I don't understand why people play games if all they want to do is win constantly. Just kill things and win. Thats it. No travel, no hassles with death, no trouble whatsoever, just continuous pushing a button to get a treat. Thats why I quit WoW, once I reached the level cap, it got boring. Nothing new, just repetitive boring crap. It was fun when I was small, because I let there be a sense of danger whilst exploring. Getting to those places you'd only see on a flight path was fun, finally battling those unknown high level monsters.

Huh, yeah, top down is the king. Err, wait, aren't grey whales some of the largest nanomachines on the planet? From a single fertilized egg? Converting other creatures into itself?

Nah, must be impossible. There's no way ribosomes are nearly as complex as a transistor, or nearly as useful. Its all about chopping large hunks of matter into tiny bits.

"Real" nanotechnology is the ability to manipulate matter at that scale. How is the matter in a CPU manipulated to build the CPU? It isn't. Its chopped away from larger chunks. No matter how small it gets, this process cannot produce complex structures or machines as well as nanotechnology.

Umm, no, they wouldn't be effective. Who would you bomb, in Iraq or Afghanistan? What large largets are there? What huge armies are we trying to stop?

Nuclear weapons have no use in guerrilla warfare, not at all. They would have not been useful in vietnam for the same reasons.

The US is not a moral nation when it comes to war, we do what works for the purposes of the engagement. A destabilized but infrastructurally intact middle east is the goal, not conquering a foe. There is no enemy per se, just pissed off locals who are feebly fighting an invading force.

Nukes have no place in situations like these, because they are ineffective at achieving the goal. Nukes are a terror weapon, and a strategic weapon against large infrastructure. The terror aspect wouldn't work because the targets are too large, and there is no leadership or army to defeat by scaring the shit out of the population. Strategically it makes no sense because we are occupying these countries, and want/need their infrastructure.

Huh? I live in a coastal california beach town, a popular tourist destination, and can see a couple dozen oil platforms from the beach 2 blocks from my house.

You mean monopoly money?

Huh... http://www.max-planck-innovation.de/share/newsletter/Newsletter_01_2005_en.pdf

Anyway, don't know how accurate the quote is, but that is the first link to pop up.

Thats the biggest issue with high ram systems, is disk IO, in hpc thats always the biggest issue to face. We spend lots of effort on that, huge multi channel disk arrays striped raid0, trying to get all that data into ram for processing. Fast disk io is the magic art behind heavy high ram hpc.

Umm, the word simply means "improving human genetic qualities."

This isn't even that, it is not selective breeding, in a sense, it is simply choosing to bring to term babies of certain genetic qualities.

Now, it is most definitely part of a process, that could be defined as eugenics. Seeing as if we start to eliminate bearing children with certain genetic defects, eventually those defects will be less prevalent and therefore we are "improving human genetic qualities."

I guess the question is "what are genetic defects?" Diseases, flipper babies, etc. However it is not exactly selective breeding as the parents have already mated. Down the road though, as these children breed, it IS selective breeding.

Is it wrong? I don't think so. Can it be construed as eugenics? Of course it can. What does favoring blue eyes have to do with Hitler? Because he favored blue eyes? And blond hair? So do a lot of men. And women. So what.

Just because an idea was taken to some bizarre extreme, doesn't make mechanisms which allow finer control of who parents choose to bear to term evil. No matter what word you use to describe it.

Nobody is engineering these embryos. They are fertilized eggs that are then screen for traits, and only the ones wanted are implanted.

There are no mucking with genes being done. Its a passive process. Make X many embryos, and scan them for various traits. Pick the ones you want. Simple, and non threatening to the species.

Humans are not evolving anymore anyway, so what does it matter? We do not exist in a world of natural selection pressures.
 

Of course it does, there is ample gravity for an atmosphere. The magnetic field isn't really the issue for an atmosphere, its the shielding from solar radiation that the magnetic field helps with. Without one, life will have a hard time taking hold, and living on the surface will be problematic.

Jesus. You just don't get it. TPB does NOT HOST ANY CONTENT. At all! It simply provides a place for a torrent file to be hosted. The torrent file is NOT infringing content.

They simply set up a torrent tracker. For whatever purposes anybody wants to use it for. Interestingly, many of the large file sets out there are infringing content, and torrents happen to be a good way of distributing that data. However, ALL content is hosted on USERS hard drives, not a drip on TPB. Not ever. All of the content is shared between users, they simply have a mechanism to find each other via the torrent protocol, of which a tracker is a crucial part.

It doesn't really matter that most of the content is infringing. It only matters if TPB causes that infringement. If they are culpable, then so is google. Its as simple as that. You need to understand what bittorrent IS. It is peer-to-peer file sharing. The PEERS are infringing. TPB just chose a really bad name for their tracker site.

Of course, because scribblings on tombs don't tell us the entire history of said civilization, then there cannot possibly be any events which aren't in full evidence.

Whatever, its all a big conspiracy and religious wackos are just trying to fool you. Its not like tobacco and coca were actually found on mummies or anything. Oh wait, they were.

We don't even have any idea exactly how the pyramids were built, or if they were built by slaves, or any number of things we do not know about their civilization from scratches on walls and dirt and graves. Just conjecture and supposition, with a great many competing hypothesis.

Does it even matter? Its interesting data, doesn't require an inquisition to proves its meaning. There are a great many things we will never, ever know about ancient egypt. Which is actually almost EVERYTHING about them. Deal with it.

Whats the big deal, are you so sure that over the thousands of years these civilizations existed, nobody ever made a boat trip across the atlantic?

They weren't about to paint their tombs with farm records. I'm sure all kinds of cross pollination happened all over the planet in the thousands and thousands of years these large trading civilizations existed. Why is that so amazing, unbelievable or even that interesting?

Just because some young civilization that now claims to have done everything first (europe) wants to be remembered as FIRST to cross the oceans, doesn't make it so. I'm sure the Egyptians, in all their many many years, could build some ships to make the journey. Entire Egyptian dynasties came and went in a time span dwarfing the few centuries that europe has been out of the stone age.

I am going to use whatever options are available to me, not just the "proper" ones that you have decided are ok because some corporation told you it is the correct route.

I have no problem downloading content, especially if it "harms" Tom Cruise.

I most definitely WILL make my own mind up on what is right and wrong. I behave in society according to the rules I have about right/wrong, not what I am told to do.

I DO purchase media, when I WANT the producer to receive my money. I can choose who my money goes to, I can also choose to view for free things I want to view even when I do not want the producer to make money from it.

There are a great many laws I do not agree with, and also disobey. I am not a sheep, I can and will do as I see fit, too bad you are so shackled with rules and bullshit to see that you actually are an individual that can make his own choices. I do not harm people. I do not hurt others. I do not steal THINGS. Just because my actions violate some bizarre broken business model, means nothing to me. Give me a reason to give you my money, and I will. Otherwise go away.

Of course, I am so bad and evil and the problem with society. Because I do not walk the line, praise the powers and worship the dollar. And you know what? There is NOTHING you can do about it. NOTHING.